It, Page 88

  Richie began to cough. He could hear Mike beside him, also coughing. The smoke was thicker, washing out the greens and grays and reds of the day. Mike fell again and Richie lost his hand. He groped for it and could not find it.

  Mike! He screamed, panicked, coughing. Mike, where are you? Mike! MIKE!

  But Mike was gone; Mike was nowhere. richie! richie! richie! (!!WHACKO!!)

  "richie! richie! richie, are you

  6

  all right?"

  His eyes fluttered open and he saw Beverly kneeling beside him, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. The others--Bill, Eddie, Stan, and Ben--stood behind her, their faces solemn and scared. The side of Richie's face hurt like hell. He tried to speak to Beverly and could only croak. He tried to clear his throat and almost vomited. His throat and lungs felt as if they had somehow been lined with smoke.

  At last he managed, "Did you slap me, Beverly?"

  "It was all I could think of to do," she said.

  "Whacko," Richie muttered.

  "I didn't think you were going to be all right, is all," Bev said, and suddenly burst into tears.

  Richie patted her clumsily on the shoulder and Bill put a hand on the back of her neck. She reached around at once, took it, squeezed it.

  Richie managed to sit up. The world began to swim in waves. When it steadied down he saw Mike leaning against a tree nearby, his face dazed and ashy-pale.

  "Did I puke?" Richie asked Bev.

  She nodded, still crying.

  In a croaking, stumbling Irish Cop's Voice, he asked, "Get any on ye, darlin?"

  Bev laughed through her tears and shook her head. "I turned you on your side. I was afraid ... a-a-afraid you'd ch-ch-choke on it." She began to cry hard again.

  "Nuh-Nuh-No f-fair," Bill said, still holding her hand. "I-I-I'm the one who stuh-huh-hutters a-around h-here."

  "Not bad, Big Bill," Richie said. He tried to get to his feet and sat down again heavily. The world was still swimming. He began to cough and turned his head away, aware that he was going to retch again only a moment before it happened. He threw up a mess of green foam and thick saliva that mostly came out in ropes. He closed his eyes tight and croaked, "Anyone want a snack?"

  "Oh shit!" Ben cried, disgusted and laughing at the same time.

  "Looks more like puke to me," Richie said, although, in truth, his eyes were still tightly shut. "The shit usually comes out the other end, at least for me. I dunno about you, Haystack." When he opened his eyes at last, he saw the clubhouse about twenty yards away. Both the window and the big trapdoor were thrown open. Smoke, thinning now, puffed from both.

  This time Richie was able to get to his feet. For a moment he was quite sure he was going to retch again, or faint, or both. "Whacko," he murmured, watching the world waver and warp in front of his eyes. When the feeling passed, he made his way over to where Mike was. Mike's eyes were still weasel-red, and from the dampness on his pants cuffs, Richie thought that maybe ole Mikey had taken a ride on the stomach-elevator, too.

  "For a white boy you did pretty good," Mike croaked, and punched Richie weakly on the shoulder.

  Richie was at a loss for words--a condition of exquisite rarity.

  Bill came over. The others came with him.

  "You pulled us out?" Richie asked.

  "M-Me and Buh-Ben. Y-You were scuh-scuh-rheaming. B-Both of y-y-you. B-B-But--" He looked over at Ben.

  Ben said, "It must have been the smoke, Bill." But there was no conviction in the big boy's voice at all.

  Flatly, Richie said: "You mean what I think you mean?" Bill shrugged. "W-W-What's th-that, Rih-Richie?"

  Mike answered. "We weren't there at first, were we? You went down because you heard us screaming, but at first we weren't there."

  "It was really smoky," Ben said. "Hearing you both screaming that way, that was scary enough. But the screaming ... it sounded ... well ..."

  "It s-s-sounded very f-f-f-far a-away," Bill said. Stuttering badly, he told them that when he and Ben had gone down, they hadn't been able to see either Richie or Mike. They had gone plunging around in the smoky clubhouse, panicked, scared that if they didn't act quickly the two boys might die of smoke poisoning. At last Bill had gripped a hand--Richie's. He had given "a huh-huh-hell of a yuhyank" and Richie had come flying out of the gloom, only about one-quarter conscious. When Bill turned around he had seen Ben with Mike in a bear-hug, both of them coughing. Ben had thrown Mike up and out through the trapdoor.

  Ben listened to all this, nodding.

  "I kept grabbing, you know? Really not doing anything except jabbing my hand out like I wanted to shake hands. You grabbed it, Mike. Damn good thing you grabbed it when you did. I think you were just about gone."

  "You guys make the clubhouse sound a lot bigger than it is," Richie said. "Talking about stumbling around in it and all. It's only five feet on every side."

  There was a moment's silence while they all looked at Bill, who stood in frowning concentration.

  "It w-w-was b-bigger," he said at last. "W-W-Wasn't it, Ben?"

  Ben shrugged. "It sure seemed like it. Unless it was the smoke."

  "It wasn't the smoke," Richie said. "Just before it happened--before we went out--I remember thinking it was at least as big as a ballroom in a movie. Like one of those musicals. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, something like that. I could barely see Mike against the other wall."

  "Before you went out?" Beverly asked.

  "Well ... what I mean ... like ..."

  She grabbed Richie's arm. "It happened, didn't it? It really happened! You had a vision, just like in Ben's book!" Her face was glowing. "It really happened!"

  Richie looked down at himself, and then at Mike. One of the knees of Mike's corduroy pants was out, and both the knees of his own jeans were torn. He could look through the holes and see bleeding scrapes on both his knees.

  "If it was a vision, I never want to have another one," he said. "I don't know about de Kingfish over there, but when I went down there, I didn't have any holes in my pants. They're practically new, for gosh sakes. My mom's gonna give me hell."

  "What happened?" Ben and Eddie asked together.

  Richie and Mike exchanged a glance and then Richie said, "Bevvie, you got a smoke?"

  She had two, wrapped in a piece of tissue. Richie put one of them in his mouth and when she lit it the first drag made him cough so badly that he handed it back to her. "Can't," he said. "Sorry."

  "It was the past," Mike said.

  "Shit on that," Richie said. "It wasn't just the past. It was ago."

  "Yeah, right. We were in the Barrens, but the Kenduskeag was going a mile a minute. It was deep. It was fuckin wild. Sorry, Bevvie, but it was. And there were fish in it. Salmon, I think."

  "M-My d-d-dad s-says th-there haven't been a-a-any fuhfish in the K-Kendusk-k-keag for a l-l-long tuh-hime. B-Because of the suh-sewage."

  "This was a long time, all right," Richie said. He looked around at them uncertainly. "I think it was a million years ago, at least."

  A thunderstruck silence greeted this. Beverly broke it at last. "But what happened?"

  Richie felt the words in his throat, but he had to struggle to bring them out. It felt almost like vomiting again. "We saw It come," he said at last. "I think that was it."

  "Christ," Stan muttered. "Oh Christ."

  There was a sharp hiss-gasp as Eddie used his aspirator.

  "It came out of the sky," Mike said. "I never want to see anything like that again in my whole life. It was burning so hot you couldn't really look at it. And it was thowin off electricity and makin thunder. The noise ..." He shook his head and looked at Richie. "It sounded like the end of the world. And when it hit, it started a forest fire. That was at the end of it."

  "Was it a spaceship?" Ben asked.

  "Yes," Richie said. "No," Mike said.

  They looked at each other.

  "Well, I guess it was," Mike said, and at the same time Ricie said: "No, it really wasn't a spa
ceship, you know, but--"

  They paused again while the others looked at them, perplexed.

  "You tell," Richie said to Mike. "We mean the same thing, I think, but they're not getting it."

  Mike coughed into his fist and then looked up at the others, almost apologetically. "I don't know just how to tell you," he said.

  "T-T-Try," Bill said urgently.

  "It came out of the sky," Mike repeated, "but it wasn't a spaceship, exactly. It wasn't a meteor, either. It was more like ... well ... like the Ark of the Covenant, in the Bible, that was supposed to have the Spirit of God inside of it ... except this wasn't God. Just feeling It, watching It come, you knew It meant bad, that It was bad."

  He looked at them.

  Richie nodded. "It came from . . outside. I got that feeling. From outside."

  "Outside where, Richie?" Eddie asked.

  "Outside everything," Richie said. "And when It came down ... It made the biggest damn hole you ever saw in your life. It turned this big hill into a doughnut, just about. It landed right where the downtown part of Derry is now."

  He looked at them. "Do you get it?"

  Beverly dropped the cigarette half-smoked and crushed it out under one shoe.

  Mike said, "It's always been here, since the beginning of time ... since before there were men anywhere, unless maybe there were just a few of them in Africa somewhere, swinging through the trees or living in caves. The crater's gone now, and the ice age probably scraped the valley deeper and changed some stuff around and filled the crater in ... but It was here then, sleeping, maybe, waiting for the ice to melt, waiting for the people to come."

  "That's why It uses the sewers and the drains," Richie put in. "They must be regular freeways for It."

  "You didn't see what It looked like?" Stan Uris asked abruptly and a little hoarsely.

  They shook their heads.

  "Can we beat It?" Eddie said in the silence. "A thing like that?"

  No one answered.

  CHAPTER 16

  Eddie's Bad Break

  1

  By the time Richie finishes, they're all nodding. Eddie is nodding along with them, remembering along with them, when the pain suddenly races up his left arm. Races up? No. Rips through: it feels as if someone is trying to sharpen a rusty saw on the bone in there. He grimaces and reaches into the pocket of his sport-jacket, sorts through a number of bottles by feel, and takes out the Excedrin. He swallows two with a gulp of gin-and-prune-juice. The arm has been paining him off and on all day. At first he dismissed it as the twinges of bursitis he sometimes gets when the weather is damp. But halfway through Richie's story, a new memory clicks into place for him and he understands the pain. This isn't Memory Lane we're wandering down anymore, he thinks; it's getting more and more like the Long Island Expressway.

  Five years ago, during a routine check-up (Eddie has a routine check-up every six weeks), the doctor said matter-offactly: "There's an old break here, Ed.... Did you fall out of a tree when you were a kid?"

  "Something like that," Eddie agreed, not bothering to tell Dr. Robbins that his mother undoubtedly would have fallen down dead of a brain hemorrhage if she had seen or heard of her Eddie climbing trees. The truth was, he hadn't been able to remember exactly how he broke the arm. It didn't seem important (although, Eddie thinks now, that lack of interest was in itself very odd--heis, after all, a man who attaches importance to a sneeze or a slight change in the color of his stools). But it was an old break, a minor irritation, something that happened a long time ago in a boyhood he could barely remember and didn't care to recall. It pained him a little when he had to drive long hours on rainy days. A couple of aspirin took care of it nicely. No big deal.

  But now it is not just a minor irritation; it is some madman sharpening that rusty saw, playing bone-tunes, and he remembers that was how it felt in the hospital, especially late at night, in the first three or four days after it happened. Lying there in bed, sweating in the summer heat, waiting for the nurse to bring him a pill, tears running silently down his cheeks into the bowls of his ears, thinking It's like some kook's sharpening a saw in there.

  If this is Memory Lane, Eddie thinks, I'd trade it for one great big brain enema: a mental high colonic.

  Unaware he is going to speak, he says: "It was Henry Bowers who broke my arm. Do you remember that?"

  Mike nods. "That was just before Patrick Hockstetter disappeared. I don't remember the date. "

  "I do, " Eddie says flatly. "It was the 20th of July. The Hockstetter kid was reported missing on ... what? ... the 23rd?"

  "Twenty-second, " Beverly Rogan says, although she doesn't tell them why she is so sure of the date: it is because she saw It take Hockstetter. Nor does she tell them that she believed then and believes now that Patrick Hockstetter was crazy, perhaps even crazier than Henry Bowers. She will tell them, but this is Eddie's turn. She will speak next, and then she supposes that Ben will narrate the climax of that July's events ... the silver bullet they had never quite dared to make. A nightmare agenda if ever there was one, she thinks--but that crazy exhilaration persists. When did she last feel this young? She can hardly sit still.

  "The 20th of July, " Eddie muses, rolling his aspirator along the table from one hand to the other. "Three or four days after the smoke-hole thing. I spent the rest of the summer in a cast, remember?"

  Richie slaps his forehead in a gesture they all remember from the old days and Bill thinks, with a mixture of amusement and unease, that for a moment there Richie looked just like Beaver Cleaver. "Sure, of course! You were in a cast when we went to the house on Neibolt Street, weren't you? And later... in the dark..." But now Richie shakes his head a little, puzzled.

  "What, R-Richie?" Bill asks.

  "Can't remember that part yet," Richie admits. "Can you?" Bill shakes his head slowly.

  "Hockstetter was with them that day," Eddie says. "It was the last time I ever saw him alive. Maybe he was a replacement for Peter Gordon. I guess Bowers didn't want Peter around anymore after he ran the day of the rockfight."

  "They all died, didn't they?" Beverly asks quietly. "After Jimmy Cullum, the only ones who died were Henry Bowers's friends... or his ex-friends."

  "All but Bowers," Mike agrees, glancing toward the balloons tethered to the microfilm recorder. "And he's in Juniper Hill. A private insane asylum in Augusta."

  Bill says, "W-W-What about when they broke your arm, E-E-Eddie?"

  "Your stutter's getting worse, Big Bill, " Eddie says solemnly, and finishes his drink in one gulp.

  "Never mind that, " Bill says. "T-Tell us."

  "Tell us," Beverly repeats, and puts her hand lightly on his arm. The pain flares there again.

  "All right," Eddie says. He pours himself a fresh drink, studies it, and says, "It was a couple of days after I came home from the hospital that you guys came over to the house and showed me those silver ballbearings. You remember, Bill?"

  Bill nods.

  Eddie looks at Beverly. "Bill asked you if you'd shoot them, if it came to that... because you had the best eye. I think you said you wouldn't... that you'd be too afraid. And you told us something else, but I just can't remember what it was. It's like--" Eddie sticks his tongue out and plucks the end of it, as if something were stuck there. Richie and Ben both grin. "Was it something about Hockstetter?"

  "Yes, " Beverly says. "I'll tell when you're done. Go ahead."

  "It was after that, after all you guys left, that my mother came in and we had a big fight. She didn't want me to hang around with any of you guys again. And she might have gotten me to agree--she had a way, a way of working on a guy, you know ..."

  Bill nods again. He remembers Mrs. Kaspbrak, a huge woman with a strange schizophrenic face, a face capable of looking stony and furious and miserable and frightened all at the same time.

  "Yeah, she might have gotten me to agree," Eddie says. "But something else happened the same day Bowers broke my arm. Something that really shook me up."

  H
e utters a little laugh, thinking: It shook me up, all right .... Is that all you can say? What good's talking when you can never tell people how you really feel? In a book or a movie what I found out that day before Bowers broke my arm would have changed my life forever and nothing would have happened the way it did ... in a book or a movie it would have set me free. In a book or a movie I wouldn't have a whole suitcase full of pills back in my room at the Town House, I wouldn't be married to Myra, I wouldn't have this stupid fucking aspirator here right now. In a book or a movie. Because--

  Suddenly, as they all watch, Eddie's aspirator rolls across the table by itself. As it rolls it makes a dry rattling sound, a little like maracas, a little like bones ... a little like laughter. As it reaches the far side, between Richie and Ben, it flips itself up into the air and falls on the floor. Richie makes a startled half-grab and Bill cries sharply, "Don't t-t-touch it!"

  "The balloons!" Ben yells, and they all turn.

  Both balloons tethered to the microfilm recorder now read ASTHMA MEDICINE GIVES YOU CANCER! Below the slogan are grinning skulls.

  They explode with twin bangs.

  Eddie looks at this, mouth dry, the familiar sensation of suffocation starting to tighten down in his chest like locking bolts.

  Bill looks back at him. "Who t-told you and w-w-what did they tell you?"

  Eddie licks his lips, wanting to go after his aspirator, not quite daring to. Who knew what might be in it now?

  He thinks about that day, the 20th, about how it was hot, about how his mother gave him a check, all filled out except for the amount, and a dollar in cash for himself--hisallowance.

  "Mr. Keene," he says, and his voice sounds distant to his own ears, without power. "It was Mr. Keene."

  "Not exactly the nicest man in Derry," Mike says, but Eddie, lost in his thoughts, barely hears him.

  Yes, it was hot that day, but cool inside the Center Street Drug, the wooden fans turning leisurely below the pressed-tin ceiling, and there was that comforting smell of mixed powders and nostrums. This was the place where they sold health--that was his mother's unstated but clearly communicated conviction, and with his body-clock set at half-past eleven, Eddie had no suspicion that his mother might be wrong about that, or anything else.